New site!! (revised from

[Hester]

Well... here it is! I wanted to have this ready last weekend but the server switch-over delayed me a bit. No biggie.

www.georgehester.com

I'm looking for any feedback I can get. I'm not yet done with the contact form and page so please don't send me any mail through it yet. (it won't go anywhere). :)

Some people who have seen my other site with the same domain name will maybe notice some similarities, but the entire overall design is new!

As I stated in a different thread, I needed to get away from my "personal" site and maintain a more professional and business-like site. Not that it's all "business" related, but I had to get away from the random pictures and multimedia that I will maintain in my personal site (which will be a new name and domain eventually).

This revised version is geared towards advertizing me and my designing. Not so much about all that other stuff that was there before. Hopefully I'm able to get more "straight to the point" with this site and it's less of a hassle to get around on it.

So... comments are welcome. Anything you see or catch, let me know. I posted it now because it's basically ready for the public to see... now I just need to know what to do to wrap it all up.


Thanks!!!

P.S. - sorry about the title... means to say (revised from my original...) or something... I couldn't decide what to write, hence me forgetting to finish it. :)

[aconstas1]

Re: New site!! (revised from

site looks great. I suggest you rethink the Titles of your pages. They are all George Hester something, which is great if the keywords that you want your visitors to find you by is George Hester. Perhaps you can go for marching band, marching band routines, drill design threw me for a loop for a while as I had drill bits and black & decker appliances in my mind. Just a suggestion. Your layout is beautiful.

Well done!

[Danny Canada]

Re: New site!! (revised from

George

A very nice site with a great layout and color scheme. Navigated through it found it enjoyable to browse through. You learn something new everyday as I had no idea about drills!

One thought is that you should check the length of your I-frames as one or two were too long and were just blank for a couple hundered pixels. no big deal though.

Great jobs!

Danny

[Hester]

Re: New site!! (revised from

site looks great. I suggest you rethink the Titles of your pages. They are all George Hester something, which is great if the keywords that you want your visitors to find you by is George Hester. Perhaps you can go for marching band, marching band routines, drill design threw me for a loop for a while as I had drill bits and black & decker appliances in my mind. Just a suggestion. Your layout is beautiful.

Well done!

I appreciate the suggestions on the titles. Unfortunately that's just the nature of my business. Drill Design is just the only real title because it's not just marching band... it's winterguard, indoor drumline, drum corps, indoor band, marching band, drill team... there's so many different groups that use "drill design" for their productions. I have thought about this a lot in the past too, and another title I use is "Visual Designer", but in my field of work, the term visual designer can be misconstrued with a person who is more involved with body/choreography and a more hands-on type of design, when I'm just a guy who puts dots on paper. :) It's weird, but you're correct... I need to find a way to make it less confusing.

But I still do need to change the title pages to match what they are. As far as keywords go, I do have all of that incorporated in the Meta Tags. I'm not too sure what difference it makes though.

Thanks for the suggestions... I'll see what I can do.

[Hester]

Re: New site!! (revised from

George

A very nice site with a great layout and color scheme. Navigated through it found it enjoyable to browse through. You learn something new everyday as I had no idea about drills!

One thought is that you should check the length of your I-frames as one or two were too long and were just blank for a couple hundered pixels. no big deal though.

Great jobs!

Danny

Thanks for the kind words...

I too have noticed that "problem" with the extra space at the end of the page in the inline frame. I have NO idea how to fix it, but this is the first time anyone other than me noticed. :) ha! I should probably look it up on here, now that you've mentioned it.

I have tried several things but nothing seems to work. Adjusted the size of both pages, changed fonts... bleh!

Do you, by any chance, know how to fix that??

[AmaDee]

Re: New site!! (revised from

And the wait is over. Well done, Hester, the site looks great, as expected. It looks well organized and everything flows.

I too noticed the extra space at the bottom of your bio. This, to me, an only mean one thing...you have extra invisible "aliens?" at the bottom of the page lol. Anyway, try this: Edit, Select All, and stroll down to see if you see anything that does not belong. Sometimes, you may have to go to your page properties and make your page extra long for better inspection.

Your picture for in the design section does not work.

Once again, beautiful job.

[asirimarco]

Re: New site!! (revised from

looks great George - easy to use - very impressed with the drill samples

[larazovich]

Re: New site!! (revised from

Nice site, George. Fun to look around.

[Hester]

Re: New site!! (revised...)

site looks great. I suggest you rethink the Titles of your pages. They are all George Hester something, which is great if the keywords that you want your visitors to find you by is George Hester. Perhaps you can go for marching band, marching band routines, drill design threw me for a loop for a while as I had drill bits and black & decker appliances in my mind. Just a suggestion. Your layout is beautiful.

Well done!

Alright Alex... I think I got it... I went ahead and retitled all my pages and the main site page reads "Quality Custom Drill Design for the Marching Arts". I think that'll work better!!

I too noticed the extra space at the bottom of your bio. This, to me, an only mean one thing...you have extra invisible "aliens?" at the bottom of the page lol. Anyway, try this: Edit, Select All, and stroll down to see if you see anything that does not belong. Sometimes, you may have to go to your page properties and make your page extra long for better inspection.

HAHAHA... Well... trust me, I inspected it to the finest detail. I don't think there's anything I can do. :( The iFrame target is a page that has the bio text (which was composed of the normal 'text area') and the page is sized exactly to the dimensions of the text, which is 375px W x 1510px H. The text size is set to 10px - Tahoma.

So, when I preview and/or publish, the text appears smaller and the text wraps differently. ???? So, what I guess is happening is that the page that the iframe is going to (the bio text page) is still set to 1510 px H but since the text gets smaller and wraps differently, there's extra space. ?? I even tried resizing the page to only 1000px H... it did the same thing. :( So... I'm at a loss for now.

That's the only thing I've been able to conclude. (besides the fact that if I increase the size of my browser text looking at the published page, it fills it to the right size). hmmmm.... but then the text is huge. I don't like that look so much.

Maybe it's a slight flaw with BV? (didn't think I could find any). haha!

Your picture for in the design section does not work.

Yeah - that's actually a tiny video (.wmv format) that I threw in there as a bit of a filler. It won't work on a lot of computer... Macs more specifically. If I had a flash video maker, I'd probably do that instead.

You'll notice that the black space in the middle on all of the design pages are occupied by a whole lot o' nothin'. I'm still trying to decide what to put there. :)

looks great George - easy to use - very impressed with the drill samples

Thanks a lot!! I'm working to add more in the future (not til the summer) so check back again if you remember. I'm in that "season" now, so I'll add more as they get written. :)

Nice site, George. Fun to look around.

Thank you... I'm really glad you like it. I'm still trying to add the final touches but thankfully it's not as complex as I thought it would be.


All this feedback really helps. Thanks to everyone! :)

[Hester]

Re: New site!! (revised from

Okay... I think I found a solution for the iframe extra space issues...

What I did was changed it to using a Table... one collumn wide and however many rows down to accomodate each line of text.

It took me some time but I just copied/pasted the individual lines to separate rows and filled it all the way down. Now there's a little extra space left-to-right, but it eliminated the space on the bottom.

(and I tried re-sizing the iframe box to shorten it L-to-R but then it created a horiz scroll bar). boo!!!

Can't win 'em all! :)

[AmaDee]

Re: New site!! (revised from

Well, everything looks good now. I just used FF to view your site and I was able to see the video on the Design page.

And Hooray! You fixed the Bio...nice work!

[Hester]

Re: New site!! (revised from

Alright... it's officially done! (I hope). :)

I just got the contact form up and running and should be working. (I've tested it).

I've managed to fix the text "problems" from before, and all that's really left is to add a couple pictures in the blank areas in the Design pages, and it should be all set.

If anyone notices any other problems or has suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks again for the feedback. Hopefully I fixed everything that people noted.

[AmaDee]

Re: New site!! (revised from

Homepage Gramatically Errors

Now that you've taken care of all the major "fixes", here are some minor ones. The areas in question are bolded and colored

...USA and Thailand, many of which have received
high recognition in local, national, international,state and BOA level competitions.

An alumni of the University of Michigan, agraduate from Plymouth-Canton High School from (replace "from" with "in") Canton, MI, a 4-year member of The...

...drum & bugle corps and former cast member (of) the Broadway production of Blast!, George carries...

And finally, your error page's "back" button is unlabelled.

I've only went over the homepage. Gotta work now, but will take a look at the other pages for little nuisances like these later.

[TSP]

Re: New site!! (revised from

Ok, while we are into the corrections...
You mind to have a look a my site? I'm in for corrections (for English: please make that UK corrections as I'm not into the other lingos)

Much obliged, by Jove... (just for fun this last sentence was, ahem...sounded bit like Yoda, didn't it)

[AmaDee]

Re: New site!! (revised from

lol, Jove? (Jean Pierre). Open up another thread and I will be there to respond...let's not hog George's

Just copy/paste. I'm going to look right now, but won't be posting my response into this thread, so I'll be looking out for your's.